Landed

Landed

Publisher: Mammoth Publications, 2009, Paperback: 120 pages, 978-0980010237, $12.00.

Available in Lawrence, at The Raven, or at Amazon.

Cassie Premo Steele's Poetry Show, featuring poetry and song from Landed

The poems in Landed are as close to prayer as language can get, if prayer is vision that sees into the souls of things and music that makes us move to old healing rhythms. I find myself writing whole stanzas in my journal and quoting phrases to friends wondering, "Now who said that?” Caryn Miriam Goldberg gives voice to what can't be put into words, she sets us free of old paradigms, she writes like a dream. –Julia Alvarez, author of novels, poems, essays and books for young readers, including The Woman I Kept To Myself and Return to Sender

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg's fourth book of poems, Landed, holds abundant brightnesses that delight the mind and enter the heart. The collection is rich with details both sacred and commonplace—the fine-honed work of a poet at her peak. Mirriam-Goldberg is a master of the paradoxical as she gifts the reader with insights that are at once disconcerting and comforting; as she holds joy and grief in the same hand, and asks us to trust the maker of these poems—her courage, her wisdom, and her truthtelling, as if she's lived infinity. – Maureen Seaton, author of Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen and Sex Talks to Girls

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s newest book of poetry invites readers to enter her grand tent of imagined reality. It resembles our shared world of flora, fauna, family, and towns. Yet readers must pole vaults into mythic dimensions, across historic rivers, and into altered spectrums. Mirriam-Goldberg has tight control of language, which she bends into wonderful shapes. This is a mature poet at her best. – Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09

Reading Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg's poetry is like being gently lifted into another land that's soulful, inspiring and full of surprises that somehow make one feel immediately at home. – Kelley Hunt, rhythm and blues singer-songwriter

Caryn’s poetry goes straight to the marrow, turning us inward so we can see in the rare clarity of darkness. With her richly textured, deceptively simple language, she seduces us into introspection through the beauty of both natural and inner landscapes. This is more than a book of poetry; it is a space in which mind, body and spirit merge, bringing the reader face-to-face with wholeness. – Marianela Medrano-Marra, PhD, writer and psychotherapist

Here are poems of rapture and reverence for the natural world, love poems for partners, friends and children and multiple meditations on the body. Her series of Self-Portraits echoes Pablo Neruda's Odes and interrogates the mysteries of self and time passing. Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is writing at the peak of her powers - she captures the small and large epiphanies that make us see the world differently, in all its wonder, pain, complexity and beauty. –Victoria Field, author of Many Waters, writer and poetry therapist in Cornwall, UK

Excerpt: "Jubilee"

Are you ready to give it all up, the news

that isn’t news, the sullen child calling the shots,

the scared grip of the fingers, the longing

of the spine? Are you ready to step out

into this new life, naked in the night rain?

Will you bring here the supposed treasures –

lost boys buried in cigar boxes, a glass bird

perched on the window box, the earnest wish

for someone to change her mind about you?

Jubilee is not all dance and fall.

Get up from that curb where you wait

for the parade of acceptance or the

nightmares of fear. Your life is not

made of the nameable.

The party has already started,

only a small flame that catches it all:

paper, rages, old shoes, miscarriages, empty

medicine bottles and torn blankets.

The fire that, once invited, consumes itself

and makes warmth for you, sitting there

in your new skin.

Now find or make another house.

Whatever comes, give away.

Don’t wait for answers from authority,

don’t push choices before their time.

Stand on the threshold, looking out,

imagining how one small bulb,

the size of dead newborn rabbit,

once in the ground, can winter itself

into the power of hyacinth.

Don’t settle for anything less.